Chapter 34: Window to the Moon
Chapter 34:
Window to the Moon
Window to the Moon
A
SUKA FOUND
the source of the distress signal. On the far side of the moon, lying sideways, half-buried in the regolith, a vehicle greeted Eva-02 Allegorica with orange blinking hazard lights.
“You certainly don’t look like any lunar rover I’ve ever seen,” Asuka said.
The vehicle was painted in drab greens and browns, the same earth tones that seemed to come back into fashion every several years. If she had to identify the vehicle, she’d say it was an armored military truck—something that belonged on Earth, not the moon.
“For one thing, you’ve got side view mirrors and hazard lights… And what’s that on top, an antenna? Radar? Some kind of reflective plate?”
Asuka had never seen one before, so she didn’t know it was a quantum wave mirror. The truck had belonged to the convoy in Hokkaido that had brought the supposedly invincible Super Eva to its knees by linking with Hikari’s Eva Euro-II to create a gravitational distortion.
In their fight, a rift in space had opened between the two giants. Before the rift closed, several vehicles and people had been swallowed by it and taken to the other side.
But Asuka didn’t know any of this. All she could wonder was,
What is something from Earth doing on the surface of the moon?
The truck had been deposited on the far side of the moon—a mysterious place where the ground formed parallel ripples, like crashing waves.
“I’m seeing some kind of magnetic field ahead. Is that what’s causing this pattern?”
The field lines were filtering out the cosmic rays that bombarded the moon; the expanse of basalt was black where it had been burned by the rays and gray where it was less-thoroughly cooked, like a photo negative.
“Is there anyone inside?” Asuka asked.
She assumed there would be, but she didn’t put on her spacesuit to check. She’d considered it, but just as she was about to exit the Eva, she felt a premonition of danger so strong that a chill ran down her back. She didn’t have any rational basis for changing her mind, but the very universe was being remade, and sometimes she felt like she was living in a myth. In a myth, ill omens were not to be ignored.
Proof came quickly. She looked inside the armored truck with a fiberscope. On the seats were crumpled uniforms and a white powdery substance spilling out of them.
“Salt.”
From northern Africa, through Europe, and all the way to Russia, 1.9 million people had turned into salt, and Asuka made the mental connection immediately. But why here? Why had these soldiers been turned into salt this far from home? She knelt the Allegorica’s four legs down and used both arms—the Eva’s left had halfway recovered—to gently lift the toppled truck, as if it were a sleeping child. She set the vehicle upright.
Her giant hands and fingers had deformed the outside of the truck, and she didn’t recognize any of the markings, but through the camera, she’d been able to read the labels on the instrument panels and interior surfaces, because they were in her mother tongue.
“You came from Germany.”
She searched for something she could take back with her but found nothing of significance, so once she finished taking pictures, she steered Eva-02 Allegorica in the direction of the magnetic field’s source and started walking across the striped ground.
She’d already accomplished what she’d come here for, and she didn’t think the field originated from anything more than a magnetic anomaly. Normally, she would have ignored it. But the vehicle had been pointing in that same direction, and that was reason enough to go.